Premier Honors Members for Successful Supply Chain Innovations

June 16, 2008 - The Premier healthcare alliance recently honored three alliance members with its Supply Chain Innovation Award for achieving successful innovations that have created new levels of performance and competitive advantage.

The awards were presented in ceremonies during Premier’s annual Breakthroughs Conference and Exhibition held June 10-13 in Nashville, TN. Winners were determined by a nine-member panel of external, internal and member judges.

Aurora Health Care of Milwaukee, which won two awards, the first for creating an asset investment recovery program that has a cradle-to-grave approach to maximize the remaining value of unused or underutilized medical equipment. The second award is for inclusion of a centralized clinical engineering service model in the capital supply chain, thereby creating a fully integrated, cradle-to-grave approach to all assets.

Montefiore Medical Center of New York City, a Greater New York Hospital Association (GNYHA) member, for creating a materials par-stock process using predictive modeling and advanced technology known as materials replenishment processing. By development and utilization of a template to simplify the ordering process, a bill of material requires users to enter only quantity required. Montefiore influenced Premier’s decision to develop supply chain technology to manage total spend (national, regional and local contracts), not just proprietary national contracts, more efficiently and effectively.

Geisinger Health System of Danville, PA., was awarded for developing the use of the global location number (GLN) to structure membership within Premier. This innovative system assigns each healthcare location a unique 13-digit GLN. This registry keeps track of the name, address, class of trade, and organizational hierarchy information about each provider. Additionally, it maintains the same information about the healthcare manufacturers and distributors.